NonGBBD blooms for May Day

I missed the last bloom day, so here are a few pics that I would have put up had I had time to do that, and a few others taken since.

Plus - a free thrasher thrown in.

I'm publishing this post with some info missing on some of the flowers - because I want to get out in the garden. I cleaned up a bunch of containers yesterday and bought potting mix, and today I get to put stuff in them! Fun! Later I'll come back and edit the post for missing names, but I just want to get these blooms out in the sun, on this lovely May day morning.

I love it when the thrasher sits with his big curved beak and sings his heart out in our garden - it's an incredible song, complex and melodious and more interesting than you can hear here on whatbird.com.


Above - sugar bush, looking a bit beat up with all the wet weather we had in March and early April.
Still getting Ribes speciosum blooms into late April. May day today - and they're gone.


Fabulous fremontodendron, I love you!


Not in our garden but just down the road - western colombine.


A california poppy, from nursery seeds.


Hummingbird sage, Salvia spathacea. Colonising nicely. Now some seep monkey flower is blooming in its midst and I need to put more in there - the yellow and magenta look great.


Seaside daisy, with bee. Erigeron glaucus.


Wild Gnaphalium Californica just budding. They cover our hillside where we cleared a lot of chaparral fuel load.

Wart leaved ceanothus - local native. Doesn't take a great picture but lovely in real life.

A few very early native monkeyflower.


Some seep monkeyflower from the great seep monkeyflower disaster. They are blooming quite a bit now. Mimulus guttatus. Next year I'll use them better.


Local native black sage, Salvia mellifera.

Local wild Fernald's iris, Iris fernaldii. From local seed.


Western bleeding heart - my first year of these and they are growing nicely, even where no fence! Dicentra formosa.

Lupinus aureus, blue version? not sure. From local wild seed. Anybody got an idea? Local native gathered here, 6 miles in from Soquel, on a ridge.

what kind of clarkia am I? I hope someone can tell me.

That cheerful heather - not a native.

Jerusalem sage, growing apace. Planted in fall.


Another of those non-native ornamentals I planted in fall - lots of lovely blooms on a smallish plant, so far.

Aww, rosebud! Climbing rose whose name I forget.


The damned calla lilies. I'm regretting letting them come back - not that I had much choice. I have purchased concentrated roundup, I'm so stuck for a solution here. They are coming up all over. Outside the fence as well as in.


I like the light and shade on this shot of a fremontodendron blossom.


A nursery bought douglas iris that did not escape the eradication program! I picked it and enjoyed it indoors for a while - I want to propagate the Iris fernaldii, but now I'm not sure if any seeds will be hybrids. I also discovered another clutch of them that didn't get rehomed in Fall. Maybe have to dig them up next fall and start the breeding program then!

Barely visible, coffeeberry flowers abudding. The bees were all over them!

And that's it for now folks - I'm off to put thimbleberry and heuchera and golden yarrow and lupine and maybe even seep monkeyflower into some pots. Have a lovely May day!